Over the last year, nearly a dozen Sesame Street e-books have been released for the iPhone and iPad, but this is the first title Sesame Street has released for Google Chrome.

With Chrome 9, the Chrome Web Store is now available to all users in North America. That means users can install free or paid web applications for use across machines and even on the CR-48 netbook.

Built using HTML5, this is ScrollMotion's first Chrome Web Store release. When we talked to ScrollMotion last fall, co-founder Josh Koppel told us that because the company can build apps using an HTML5 base, porting those apps to other platforms — in this case the Chrome Web Store — is much less complicated.

The story book is cute — read by Gordon from Sesame Street — and the iOS version includes the option for the reader to record his or her own voice for playback. Both versions of the app include options for reading along and for coloring digital images of Sesame Street characters.

We bought the Chrome app to give it a spin and while the quality of the book and voice recording is good, we still think the desktop reading experience leads a bit to be desired. To us, it underscores why the iPad, iPhone and future Android tablets will have so much of an advantage over the CD-ROM children's book of the 1990s: touch matters. Touch controls makes interacting with content more natural and makes the overall experience more engaging.

The promise of HTML5 is that the apps will be usable on other devices. Just imagine how cool it would be if Chrome web apps could work on Honeycomb. That might not be in the cards for the immediate future, but we expect to see some sort of fusion between the two platforms at some stage.

Mashable
is a global, multi-platform media and entertainment company. Powered by its own proprietary technology, Mashable is the go-to source for tech, digital culture and entertainment content for its dedicated and influential audience around the globe.